Friday, April 10, 2015

The problems with Everett's many worlds

I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they do not succeed in overcoming this incoherence.

Everett is the father of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. I agree that it is incoherent. Some people prefer to call it the Everett interpretation so that it sounds less wacky. It is amazing how many seemingly-educated people take it seriously. It is like a stupid science fiction plot, and there isn't much substance to the theory at all.

There are not really any theoretical or empirical reasons for preferring MWI. The arguments for it are more philosophical. Its adherents say that it is more objective, or more deterministic, or more localized, or something like that. I don't know how postulating the spontaneous creation of zillions of unobservable parallel universes can do any of those things, but that is what they say.

3 comments:

Another book has come out on the massive fraud going on in physics. I don't think the Reverend Motl will be pleased. This author actually references Rogers book, albeit in a negative way:

"In a most scathing attack on Einstein and his science, Schlafly finds it necessary to detract, rather than criticize what can be considered as Einstein's sole scientific offspring: general relativity which is not a generalization of his special relativity since it contains no relativity at all"

About this BookThe book points out what has gone wrong with physics since Einstein's formulation of this theory of general relativity a century ago. It points out inconsistencies and fallacies in the standard model of the big bang and the inflationary scenario which was supposed to have overcome those shortcomings, the evolution of string theory from a theory of the strong interaction to a theory of gravitation and quantum mechanics which has not produced a single verifiable prediction, and what it has accomplished is reaffirming wrong results like the entropy of a black hole, which is not an entropy at all. There have even been attempts to demote gravity to an emergent phenomenon with catastrophic effects. We know exactly what happened at 10-34 seconds after the big bang, but do not know how fast gravity propagates, whether gravitational waves exist, and what are the limits of Newton's law. Attempts to rectify this are the prediction of dark energy/matter, which has never been observed nor ever will, and MOND. The latter is really not a modification of Newtonian mechanics, but a transformation of a dynamical law into a statistical one.

"As I have tried to show in this book, you can’t build edifices on quagmires.In the end, it all leads back to Einstein’s general relativity, which ismuch less general than the special case, and certainly much less relative.In short, it is not applicable to the task it was developed for; the universecannot be modelled as a perfect fluid. The same is even truer of stringtheory, which cannot boast of a single physical prediction. Multiverse is asad excuse for not seeking the actual laws that govern physical phenomena.Admittedly, we have not made any theoretical progress in the hundred yearsthat general relativity, and the nearly fifty years that string theory, havebeen around. It’s time for a new start and to wipe the slate clean."

and how bout this viewpoint on Master Witten:

"String theory is actually a religion with Witten as its false prophet.His bible, M-Theory, explaining what superstring theory is, still has to be written. (With M remaining undefined, the readers await a Miracle, orMessiah.)"

He also says 't Hooft should be stripped of his nobel prize and that Hawking basically never did anything right. Bernard is no fan of Schlafly or Woit.